3-Day Octalysis Gamification Workshop (US & Europe Timezone)

“Yu-kai’s Insights were instrumental in helping Lucky Diem supercharge our client La Quinta’s bookings per user by 206% and incremental revenue per user by $157 (132% Lift) against the control group. Being able to achieve a viral coefficient of 530%, I would recommend any business to work with Yu-kai and learn his Octalysis Framework.” – Andrew Landis, Founder & CEO of Lucky Diem

After a Tremendously Successful Full-Day Octalysis Workshop, over 40 gamification enthusiasts became equipped and excited to implement great gamification design into their own world-changing projects. However, we have received feedback that the intensive 9-hour workshop was not only too short (shock!), but the time-zone made it extremely difficult for enthusiasts from other continents to participate in the full workshop (many attendees from Europe or India/Australia stayed up all night into the morning for the workshop). We also weren’t able to explore each member’s own projects in detail due to the tight timeline and the amount of information that was covered.

For this reason, we are creating a new set of workshops that are specifically catered to audience members from different continents, which are broken down into three 4-hour sessions in consecutive days, and options for people who want to just attend one over another. This event is specifically designed to cater to Europe time zones

Gamification is a field that is substantially taking off in today’s world. The premium research firm Gartner not only predicted that 70% of Fortune 500s will utilize gamification by the end of this year, there are hundreds of Gamification Case Studies with ROI stats in the double or triple digits. However, there still are many misconceptions and misunderstanding on gamification, especially when it comes to actually implementing good gamification design into your own projects. In fact, Gartner also predicted that 80% of gamification attempts would fail due to bad design. How much would you do to ensure that you are part of the 20% who gets it right and takes your business metrics to the next level?

This workshop will be about how to implement great gamification design that drives numbers through Yu-kai Chou’s Octalysis Framework. Published in late 2012, the Octalysis Gamification Framework has become a global phenomenon, being translated into over 14 different languages, and transforming many businesses throughout the world.

The premise of Octalysis is that an experience is not motivating simply because it has “game mechanics” and “game elements” in them. Every single game in the market has game mechanics in it, but most games are still boring and unsuccessful. It is rather naive to think that, once you take those game elements (such as Points, Badges, and Leaderboards) that are even found in boring games and plug them into your project, your project will automatically be fun and successful.

Instead of focusing on various game mechanics and game elements, Octalysis focuses on the 8 Core Drives, which are our inner drives that motivate us to do anything. Everything we do is based on one or more of these 8 Core Drives; which means that if none of these 8 Core Drives are present, there is no motivation, and no behavior happens.

A great gamification designer must not just understand how to create motivation, but also to design for the nature of that motivation – is it Black Hat or White Hat? Extrinsic or Intrinsic? Long Term Empowerment or Short Term Urgency?

This workshop will focus on how to use the Octalysis Framework to design motivating experiences that bring out our 8 Core Drives to completely meet your business objectives, whether it would be to close quick sales, motivate employees, create obsessive users, or motivate yourself towards good habits.

Why Should I Sign Up For this Workshop?

You should take the workshop if you:

Want to reduce your product-market-fit runway by half (very tangible for any company with a burn-rate)

Have problems with retaining users at the onboarding process

Are managing people that are not excited about doing their work

Have customers who are not engaged in marketing materials

Feel like you could use some extra motivation in your own personal improvement

Want to incentivize veteran users to contribute to your ecosystem instead of leaving

Want to be more persuasive in all types of communications

Agenda

The workshop is broken down into three sections:

Day 1: Fundamentals (9AM – 1PM Pacific Time / 4PM – 8PM UTC)

We will cover the basic groundwork of Octalysis, including topics such as:

Day 2 will be about applying what we have acquired as our knowledge on Day 1 to actual projects and examples in the real world. We will start to analyze many projects through the lenses of Octalysis and see how they motivate people, if they are White Hat or Black Hat focused, and how we would improve those experiences. We will also start to dig deeper into the Strategy Dashboard and work on many projects.

Examine many addictive games through the lenses of Octalysis and examine the strengths and weaknesses of the motivational strategies of those games, as well as the nature of the Core Drives they used.

Identify pitfalls of the games discussed and methods to improve the design through Octalysis

Examine many successful (as well as failed) real-world projects and products through the lenses of Octalysis and examine the strengths and weaknesses of the motivational strategies of those games, as well as the nature of the Core Drives they used.

Identify pitfalls of the products and the experiences discussed and methods to improve the design through Octalysis

Introduce a few specific new problems to solve

Group walk through of the Octalysis Process, starting with Defining the Strategy Dashboard

Group walk through of the Discovery Phase of the problem to solve

Group walk through of the Onboarding Phase of the problem to solve

Group walk through of the Scaffodling Phase of the problem to solve

Group walk through of the Endgame Phase of the problem to solve

Create an Effect-Ease Feature List through Spreadsheets

Using the preceding results, derive an Actionable Concept Wireframe of the Solution

Day 3 will be focusing on attendee projects, sharing, discussing, and receiving critical assessment, guidance, and feedback from Yu-kai Chou. Instead of learning about everything in theory, attendees will get the opportunity to apply it to their own projects and ensure optimized motivation. This will be very similar to how Yu-kai consults with his clients (value in the thousands of dollars) with a more collaborative setting so each attendee can also learn from each others’ projects. We will cover:

Attendees Introduce themselves and their own projects

Group work through the Strategy Dashboard

Work out attendee Business Metrics -> Game Objectives and discuss

Work out attendee Users -> Players and discuss

Work out attendee Desired Actions -> Win-States and discuss

Work out attendee User Metrics -> Feedback Mechanics and discuss

Work out attendee Incentives -> Rewards and discuss

Work through attendee project: 8 Core Drives of the Discovery Phase and discussion

Work through attendee project: 8 Core Drives of the Onboarding Phase and discussion

Work through attendee project: 8 Core Drives of the Scaffolding Phase and discussion

Work through attendee project: 8 Core Drives of the Endgame Phase and discussion

Refine each project into an EE (Effect-Ease) Feature List

Design Concept Wireframes for Final Concept

Prerequisites

There are no requirements for the Day 1 Workshop. Sign-up with an open mind, ready to be blown.

For Day 2, the Day 1 Workshop completion is not necessarily required. However, the attendee must have a strong understanding of the information shared publicly through Yu-kai Chou’s videos, blog posts, book, and public speeches.

For Day 3, the attendee MUST have also attended the Day 2 workshop, OR have attended Yu-kai Chou’s Full-Day Octalysis Workshop Previously. Day 3 is meant to be the most intimate and rewarding.

Extrinsic (and some Intrinsic) Rewards

1. Towards the end of each Day, one attendee who has the best participation or experience design will be selected to receive a 100% Fee Refund. If you are good, you come for free.

2. All attendees of the workshops will receive a FREE signed copy of Yu-kai Chou’s upcoming book Actionable Gamification – Beyond Points, Badges, and Leaderboards upon its completion.

3. Lifetime FREE* Submissions (with Feedback) of the Level 1 Octalysis Certificate (if not qualified at end of the workshop)

4. Signing up to Day 2 or 3 will receive a personalized message from Yu-kai Chou in his upcoming book.

5. Selected Day 3 Attendee projects will be featured on various materials by Yu-kai Chou for status/promotional purposes.

6. Day 3 impressive performances may also lead to opportunities to work with Yu-kai Chou on various projects and eventually joining his team.

Why Does Gamification Work?

Gamification is described by Yu-kai Chou as “Human-Focused Design,” as opposed to “Function-Focused Design.” Most design systems are function focused – assuming people will do the activities and simply optimizes for efficiency. Even traditional UX/UI/Usability focuses on making tasks “easier” to do, assuming users already have motivation, instead of creating motivation itself. Human-Focused Design optimizes for human emotion and motivation, ultimately creating behavior that drives business results.

The reason why we term this craft gamification is because the gaming industry is the first to master Human-Focused Design. There is no real purpose for playing a game. You have to do your taxes, go to work, go to school, but you never have to play a game. The instant a game is no longer fun, people leave the game – they play another game, check their emails, or go on Youtube.

Because games have spent decades trying to figure out how to get the masses to spend hours everyday engaging with their platforms when there is no real purpose to them, we are now learning how to apply that discipline to services that have important functions but aren’t as emotionally engaging. As long as you can define a Desired Action, we can improve motivation towards it. Gamification combines many fields such as game design, game dynamics, motivational psycology, behaviorial economics, UX/UI, neurobiology, technology platforms, and business systems to drive measureable results.

And don’t just take our word on it. As noted above, there are hundreds of detailed case studies showing gamification providing an extremely high amount of ROI in the double or even triple digits.

About the Speaker

Yu-kai Chou is a Pioneer and International Keynote Speaker on Gamification. He has been a regular speaker/lecturer on Gamification Worldwide, including at organizations like Stanford University, Accenture, TEDx, SxSW, Gamified India, Huawei, the Innovation Center in Denmark, and many more.

Yu-kai was one of the earliest pioneers in Gamifcation, starting his work in the industry in 2003 and was rated the #1 Gamification Guru in the World by the World Gamification Congress in Europe (not to say that he is actually the best at anything, but something nice to have on a Bio). Yu-kai is President of The Octalysis Group and a Partner at the Enterprise Gamification Consultancy (EGC). He is best known as the creator of The Complete Gamification Framework: Octalysis. He is also the creator and instructor of The Beginner’s Guide to Gamification Videos Series.

Previously, Yu-kai was the Co-Founder and CEO of RewardMe, a digital loyalty platform that gamified offline commerce that was rated by AlwaysOn as one of the Top 10 Private Companies to Watch. RewardMe also won Best Commercial App at the first location-based service awards “The Locals.

You are leaving money on the table every single day when you don’t have this knowledge. Register Now.

Success in the new world are for those that hustle cleverly. Those who wait end up in regret. Join us and learn how to change the world through motivation and engagement!

Get mentored by Yu-kai Chou

Every week I hop on a conference call to teach, answer questions, and give feedback to members of Octalysis Prime. If you want to take your Gamification practice to the next level, then come join us.

Would you like Yu-kai Chou to work with your Organization?

If you are interested in working with Yu-kai Chou for a business project, workshop, speech or presentation, or licensing deal, please fill out the form below.